Between dance numbers a kind of dumb waiter was circulated around the room. It had to be pushed around, but fine metallic tentacles curled from it, grasping bottles to pour, even mixing cocktails: Martian technology, of course, and a pretty advanced experiment. A glimpse of the industries of the future, perhaps. It seemed grotesque to me. The beautiful people clapped and laughed in delight…
We went on, deeper into the wilds of London – to a dance hall in Soho, where a band from America played ‘Tiger Rag’, and the dancing was as fierce as the music…
And throughout these foolish adventures I said nothing of what had given me my ‘turn’ on Primrose Hill. In the gloom of that March evening, even as the children of London had played around its tremendous feet, I thought I saw the Martian turn its head.
8
A MEETING AT OTTERSHAW
The next morning, even if I was a little tender, I was ready for Philip and Eden and Cook, and our drive to Surrey. It was March 25, a Thursday.
It was a little after lunch when we gathered at last in Ottershaw, some three miles to the north of Woking where Walter and Carolyne Jenkins had once shared a home – and, though this site was only a couple of hours’ walk from the location of the first Martian landing, it was just outside the Surrey Corridor perimeter.
Marina Ogilvy, our hostess for the evening, had long been a friend of Carolyne’s, though the closest relationship had been their husbands’. Benjamin Ogilvy had been a noted amateur astronomer, with his own small observatory in Ottershaw. In that eerie summer of ’07, he and Walter had watched through Benjamin’s telescope those reddish sparkings on the disc of planet Mars, those gushes of gas, that turned out to have been signs of the firing of a mighty cannon. What a disturbing thrill it must have been for Walter and Benjamin to see it with their own eyes! And the first landing at Horsell, so close to his home, must have been a kind of vindication for Benjamin the amateur – that and the response of the Astronomer Royal himself, who had come out to Horselclass="underline" the crowning moment of Benjamin’s life, perhaps. To be followed pretty rapidly by his death, in the first few hours of humanity’s encounter with the Martians.
Despite this grisly outcome, or even because of it perhaps, Marina had kept on the house, and she had maintained her husband’s observatory, neither of which had been damaged during the War. She had even let out the observatory to a local amateur-astronomical group, of which, of course, a profusion had sprung up after the night sky became an arena of threat for all of us. Later, of course, the telescopic observation of Mars by amateurs had been banned by the Marvin government under their Defence of the Realm Act of 1916; now Benjamin’s grand old telescope was without mirrors and eyepieces.
Anyhow, Marina had generously offered to host our telephonic meeting with Walter. Hers at least was one telephone number Walter had retained, even if he had lost contact with Carolyne, his own ex-wife. Carolyne had quickly sold her own house on the Maybury Road in Woking after her divorce. I suppose the reason for the breakdown of her marriage is obvious, if you read the Narrative. But it seemed somehow fitting to be in a location so close to the start of it all.
So here I was, with Philip. Here were Eric Eden and Bert Cook, who had followed us home in my wake, so to speak, both of them alarmed or intrigued by the tantalising promise of Walter’s news.
And of course my own ex-husband had to be summoned to the gathering too: Walter’s brother, Frank Jenkins. Thus the Martians, those interplanetary matchmakers, brought us together once again, for we had first met during the great flight from London. Frank was a medical student then, and I at nineteen a few years younger with ambitions to become a journalist. And for a while it worked. Frank completed his studies, and settled down to what had evidently always been his ambition, to become a general practitioner, and we bought a house in Highgate.
Bur Frank had always had something of his brother’s sense of destiny about him. Though heavily committed to his practise, he would often let himself be called away on what I described as his ‘missionary’ work among the destitute in the East End. And in ’16, when the DORA was passed, Frank surprised me by being drawn to Marvin’s new programmes of military service. He had quickly enlisted in the Territorial Force, a volunteer reserve, which Marvin, with typical cunning showmanship, renamed the ‘Fyrd’, a nod to deep English roots.
‘Oh, for pity’s sake!’ I had protested. ‘I can understand a schoolboy enjoying all the marching about. But you – you’re a man of healing.’
‘I heal humans,’ he said. ‘I would kill Martians. At High Barnet, remember, it was your brother’s revolver that saved us from the ruffians who wanted your cart, Julie, and a bit of my boxing from school, not my nascent medicals skills, or even your high spirits. There are times when one must fight…’
Well, to be a witness to self-assumed greatness was never enough for me. And besides – it is hard to record this so bluntly, but it was a difference between us – I had never wanted children. Not after the horrors of the Martian War; whatever you may read of Walter, that was its lingering effect on my psyche. Other survivors reacted similarly; Eric Eden, for example, never married. It is just as well the rest of the human race doesn’t share that flaw; indeed after the war there was a sharp rise in the number of births in Britain.
Frank understood, I think, but did not share my reluctance. Since we had divorced, Frank had married again, he had a child, and I was happy enough for him. But I wasn’t terribly comfortable to be in his presence again, here in this relic of our calamitous past, and I dare say nor was he.
So the six of us gathered early that afternoon, replete on Marina’s tea and finger sandwiches: myself, Carolyne, Philip Parris, Frank, Eric Eden and Bert Cook. It was a vivid scene, with our six faces glowing like moons in the light of a single, shadowed electric bulb – there are only dim lights in an observatory, of course. The building itself was a cylinder, topped by its hemispherical dome. The telescope sat on a stone pillar, beside the clockwork that enabled it to track the motion of the sky. That sky itself was visible through the open roof, a slice of blue. I remember the smell of oil and furniture polish and clockwork, with the dome over us adding a peculiar echo to the soft sounds of our voices. The main telescope itself, angular in the shadows, had an eerie Martian-like quality that made me unwilling to turn my back on it. It was rather cold, too. I could feel my own tension rising – a tension that had never gone away since Walter had approached me in New York. Of course it was news of the Martians I feared hearing, yet oddly longed to hear, if only to remove the suspense.
It was something of a shock when the telephone finally rang, right on cue.
9
A CALL FROM GERMANY
Bert Cook had some practical skills, and, with odds and ends from the observatory tool box and the remains of a broken Marvin’s Megaphone, he had managed to rig up a small loudspeaker so that we could all hear Walter’s thin voice, relayed from Germany. Though Walter asked to speak to Philip, that good man firmly passed the handset to the man’s former wife.